Building resilience to natural disasters

DFID has taken a well-considered approach to mainstreaming resilience to natural disasters, and has helped to promote the inclusion of resilience into the global development agenda.

Score: Green/Amber
  1. Status: Completed
  2. Published: 28 February 2018
  3. Type: Performance review
  4. Subject: Climate change and biodiversity, Humanitarian assistance
  5. Assessment: Green/Amber
  6. Location: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nepal, Occupied Palestinian Territories, Uganda
  7. Lead commissioner: Richard Gledhill
  8. SDGs covered:No poverty, Sustainable cities and communities, Climate action, Industry, innovation and infrastructure

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Review

This review found that DFID has taken a well-considered approach to mainstreaming resilience to natural disasters, and has helped to promote the inclusion of resilience into the global development agenda. We therefore awarded DFID a green-amber overall score, and made five recommendations.

Findings

Overall, this review found that DFID has taken a well-considered approach to mainstreaming resilience to natural disasters, and has helped to promote the inclusion of resilience into the global development agenda. In particular, it found that DFID’s humanitarian, environmental and climate related programmes were consistently contributing to reducing vulnerability and strengthening resilience.

However, the review also found that performance was more variable in other sectors, such as health, education, infrastructure and governance, where resilience to natural disasters was not an explicit objective. With the mainstreaming process over, the review also said that DFID should do more to make sure that results measurement and learning is improved.

The review warned that DFID was failing to routinely gather, synthesise and communicate its growing knowledge base on resilience, and said that DFID should do more to make sure that results measurement and learning is improved.

Recommendations

Based on this review, we made the following five recommendations:

  1. In partner countries with significant risks from natural disasters, DFID should keep its risk assessments and resilience strategies up to date, working where possible in conjunction with national governments and other development partners.
  2. DFID offices in high-risk countries should adopt a portfolio approach to resilience, articulating how their efforts in different sectors and areas will work together to build resilience.
  3. DFID should develop its guidance on how to measure resilience results, providing options that can be adopted by country offices according to their contexts and needs.
  4. DFID should undertake a stocktake of its work on resilience in high-risk countries to assess the contribution of its programming and influencing activity to building resilience and disaster preparedness, to inform its country strategies. This could be done periodically, or following significant natural disasters.
  5. DFID should establish a community of practice to promote the continuing mainstreaming of resilience to natural disasters and provide technical and expert support to the dissemination of knowledge and evidence.

 

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Timeline

Approach

Published 13 Jun 2017

Evidence gathering

Complete

Review publication

Published 28 February 2018

Government response

Published 11 April 2018

Parliamentary scrutiny

IDC hearing 23 May 2018

ICAI follow-up

Published 18 July 2019